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Voznesensky, Andrei - The poet is two people
Identifier
025403
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Psychic Discoveries – Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder
Muses and goddesses, spirits and second selves, genies-ever since writers began ordering words they've talked of that outside something that comes bearing gifts. The contemporary Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky describes this feeling better than most:
"The poet is two people. One is an insignificant person, leading the most insignificant of lives. But behind him, like an echo, is the other person who writes poetry. . . . Often the real man has no idea what path or what action the other will take. That other man is the prophet who is in every poet."
There is hardly a writer even half alive who hasn't said, "It came to me. It was like taking dictation."